Tweets about Daniel Miller’s UOC presentation on Facebook

Tweets from presentation FACEBOOK – AN EXTREME READINGNB – best read from bottom to top.
Daniel Miller – UCL (University College London), IN3 Visiting Professor, Open University of Catalonia (UOC)

Barcelona, 30 May 2011

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on a study of Facebook in Trinidad recently published in the book Tales from Facebook (Polity 2011). This suggests that previous arguments about the internet need to be re-thought since in some ways Facebook represents the opposite, rather than a continuity, with the prior internet. The focus of this paper is on the global and older population as opposed to earlier literature on US students.

The paper then goes beyond that publication to open up three more extreme possibilities. That Facebook flies in the face of foundational assumptions within social science with regard to the nature of modern sociality. Secondly that Facebook is a way in which people attempt to create a relationship to God. Thirdly that Facebook runs parallel to one of the best known anthropological theories of culture, based on the Kula ring, and seems to suggest that Strathern’s characterisation of Melanesian personhood actually applies much more widely.